This might belong in the Barb thread, but it may apply to Monks as well but I cannot be sure having never played a Monk before. The reason I opened a seperate thread is because this is a very specific topic I wish to touch on, and in general threads things get derailed too quickly. I wish for this to be a thread of constructive opinions, and hopefully get a few insights along the way. All thoughts here are merely an opinion of mine. It's a long read for a forum post.

I'd like to discuss the gameplay of melee heroes, or rather the change in gameplay when getting to Inferno. And this will mostly apply for solo games where you do not have the benefit of other characters pulling aggro.

In Normal, Nightmare and even maybe Hell there are many builds you can utilize. Like Jay Wilson always said, it's all about viable builds. Inferno though, changes the game when it comes to which builds are viable. Rock in a weird build in Inferno and chances are Elites will melt you within 5 secs.



Why the sudden change in gameplay landscape?

- Diminishing returns on investment for items.
Every point of DPS you add will cost you more and more gold, or money. Going from a 400 DPS to 500 DPS weapon is going to cost you a lot less as compared to going from a 900 DPS to a 1000 DPS weapon. Soon enough, you will hit the hard limit where upgrades are a lot harder to come by and you're limited by either cost or game design (Currently for example there is no 1H with 2k DPS). Any wall you hit in Normal, you can overcome by item upgrades that allow you to break the "Kill time threshold". Same goes with defensive items.


- Minion HP exceeds "Kill time threshold".
First of all, let me clarify "Kill time threshold". Put simply, it is the time your character can spend hitting a specific target before your life bottoms out or you need to pull out of the fight. There are many things that can affect this threshold, such as :

- Minion Health
- Minion DPS
- Your DPS
- Your Health, Armor and Resistance
- Your skills (For healing or sustain)
- Sustain (LOH, Life regen)
- Etc.

As a melee character, you will take damage when you're dealing damage. This is a given. In a nutshell, when you engage a minion there are 2 outcomes to that straight fight. Either minion dies, or you pull out due to low life. The point where you start the engagement and you opt to pull out is your "Kill time threshold". This is the area I wish to touch on.




Kill minions within the threshold

Optimal solution. In other difficulty levels, this is possible by adding DPS. In Inferno however, it's not. Let's say you can straight up tank any Elites for 8 full seconds with the use of Ignore Pain and Revenge procs. Can you realistically kill before the 10 seconds is up? In the later Acts of Inferno, Elites rock anywhere between 2-3M HP. Champions up to 4M. Affixes such as Shielding makes it worse. Unless you're rocking a 200k DPS melee hero, you have to look for other alternatives.




Extending the threshold

There are 2 ways I can think of that extends the time you stay in battle, and will go through these :


Health Globes

The route utilized by all out offence melee chars. The theory behind this is you use Health Globes to sustain you through the fight to the point you kill the minion. Health Globes have a chance to drop when the minion hits half health or dies. The 'Sword to Ploughshires' rune gives you increased chance. Again, it all comes down to if you can have a high enough DPS to half life the minion and sustain that DPS through for the kill. The insane amount of HP Elites and Champions have in Inferno renders this build impossible in some scenarios.

Make it work : High DPS, enough defensive stats



Sustain

The most popular and expensive route. Sustain comes in the form of Life Leech, either from % of dmg done or Life On Hit. In Inferno currently, % of Dmg Done is near useless because in Inferno this is reduced to 20% efficiency. To put this into perspective, let's say you're going for 2k Life per hit. To hit 2k Life per hit using LOH is a lot easier than % of Dmg Done. Let's say you managed to obtain 10% Life Leech on Dmg Done, which is pretty high. Now, to get 2k life per hit in Inferno, you need to put out 100k DPS. Which is crazy high for a melee character without WotB.

Make it work : High LOH, enough defensive stats



So from this, there comes the deduction that LOH sustain is the only way to go in the later Acts of Inferno assuming you want to win every fight. Would like to see some thoughts on some non-LOH builds theoratically that may be viable for Act 4 Inferno.

If a melee char is going to build around kiting, why play a Barb when you could play a DH and be so much more effective at it?

I'm disappointed.

What's your DPS (Exclude WotB)? From the response I've been getting from Bnet 2H Barbs, the wall comes in end Act 3 and Act 4. The main issue for them is getting the Elites to half life quick enough with the increased Minion life pool.

Perhaps I worded it a bit too blurry. I know the goal of stacking LOH is as a form of damage mitigation which buys you some time to kill the elites without kicking the bucket yourself, hence extending the window for yourself. And currently crit chance/crit damage is the way to go.

The reason for my post is that there only seems to be 2 ways to go for a more viable Inferno melee hero. Either by stacking sustain (Damage mitigation) or by health globe dependency for healing.

Edited : Help me theorize a potential build that can survive Inferno. Be creative! Screw cookie cutters.

This post has been edited by statikinetic: Jul 9 2012, 11:47 AM

The non-LOH, kill faster was the crux of my initial opinion. While it's simple enough to point out to someone a step by step guide on surviving with a specific build, I wanted to challenge some of the regulars here to think of a non-LOH build that may actually work.

Looking for people debate me on a theorized non-LOH Inferno ready build. Complete with skills to use. Let's start thinking for a change and theorize rather than be a constant flow of monkey see monkey do.

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Added on July 9, 2012, 12:39 pmI have no problems in early Acts in Inferno too. My AR is around 700-800.
My DPS is 45k without WotB. With WotB is goes to just over 100k. The total cost for all my current gear is under 2M gold.

I play with my ideals in mind. I have a set vision on what a barb is, and my itemization is built around that. While it would be easier to totally change it for a "double tornado survive Inferno no problemo" build, I wanted to rethink on how to make it work rather than reverting to a common cookie cutter.

This post has been edited by statikinetic: Jul 9 2012, 12:40 PM

Because in Inferno, Life Leech is cut to 20%. I wrote about it under 'sustain' in the initial post. For example to beat 2k LOH, assuming you get a massive 10% life leech :

DPS : 100k
Life Leech : 10%

Total life leeched from damage : 10k life

Inferno life leech rate (20%) : 10k * 20%

Total net life leech : 2k



As you can see, unless you're outputting massive amounts of damage consistently (Like over 100k DPS)...under current game mechanics LOH is more efficient.

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Added on July 9, 2012, 2:13 pmDamage dealt from Thorns is too low to make it anywhere close to main weapon damage for it to become viable, so there is not much to boost for your 50%. Boost a low number and it will still be low.

Might have been viable in D2 with the Paladin Thorn aura, but not here. If the old D2 Paladin was here, he'd just convert an Elite and slap Thorn aura on it and watch everything suicide on it.

This post has been edited by statikinetic: Jul 9 2012, 02:13 PM

While I don't see it coming anywhere close to being effective in Inferno, I do see the potential in trolling Normal mode.

10k Thorns damage in Normal. Just walk around picking up loot as everything just dies off you. Oh, did we just come up with a potential bot setup?

It's for arguments sake that I used a nice round number to show efficiency between LOH and % life leech. It would be the same if I used numbers like 1476 LOH, but that would result in a little more work in calculation. In the end, it is just to highlight the difference in efficiency.

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Added on July 9, 2012, 2:32 pmFor Inferno lol.

But yes, if you want to try it out I suggest you stack your Thorns damage with massive life regen. Both stats come very cheaply. That way in Normal, you don't even need to bother with Revenge.

This post has been edited by statikinetic: Jul 9 2012, 02:32 PM

I understand what you're saying bro.

Monks hit faster, so your LOH will scale off additional hits. Barbs stacking damage will hit harder, so more damage gets converted into life. Will probably need to spend a bit to test out which is viable.

It is.
You only get 20% of what you're would normally get in Normal.

If they ever do decide to release the nerf for melee chars, I'd be happy. I theorize it's there to prevent high DPS classes (DH and Wiz) from doing 200k DPS and being able to tank everything because of the massive leech.

This post has been edited by statikinetic: Jul 9 2012, 03:15 PM

Kung Fu Barb Diablo run on Normal tonight. No weapons, no shield. Punch all the way!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=playe...Or9_gwk#t=3117s

Jay Wilson:"So why? Why Viable over optimal? Why are we even talking about this? So, Diablo has tons and tons of customization, we did the math on the new skill systems with the combination of passives and runes and we threw a crazy number out, uh, a few years back like 69 Billion, we're really more in the area of 2.8 Trillion- Trillion? Trillion. [2.8] Trillion builds. So that's a lot of builds. Um, and why? Why so many builds? Because customization is self expression, and if you have to build a character to be perfectly optimized, that's not really going to allow you to customize that character. So our job is to make sure that, yeah, that, you know, while there might be some best builds there's tons and tons of viable ones. It's totally okay for there to be best builds, it's totally okay for someone to go 'you know what, I made this Barbarian and he's got like 0.5% more damage than any other build you can possibly make.' And you know what, there's nothing wrong with that...unless you can't...unless that number becomes 'oh this, this Barbarian's like 50% more powerful.' So if we can get enough builds into that range of 'these are all viable, they can play at the max level.' It means you can play the character you want to play at max level and not be beholding anyone. So what we say is, go out, have fun, be free and make the Diablo character you want to make."


This excerpt from Jay Wilson before D3 was released sums it up well. How many builds are we looking at that are actually viable at max level (Inferno)? Where are our tonnes of viable builds?

This post has been edited by statikinetic: Jul 10 2012, 12:18 AM